The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.
Elasticity is becoming an ever-increasingly important aspect of data-center workloads for resource optimization and resiliency. Workloads are increasingly dynamically scheduled, and migrating workloads from one host to another can improve network efficiency (e.g., by co-locating communicating workloads), resource usage (e.g., by actively balancing load), and maintenance (e.g., by shutting down a server after migrating its hosted workloads away). In this context, a mobility protocol is needed when a workload is migrated from a machine to another. Existing techniques rely on updating a mapping service with the location of the virtual machine (VM) once migration has completed. This can result in packet loss during migration. For example, a packet may be sent to the VM at a time when the VM is not running on either the initial physical machine, nor on the destination physical machine.
The techniques described herein aim to provide a better service during migration, as well as alleviating some of the burden of the mapping system to track and distribute active workload locations precisely.